John Cage

An insurance man, a rocker, a partisan, a deportee, a bandoneonist.... What can such different figures have in common? Very little, you might say, apart from the fact that they are among the main protagonists of "contemporary music", a world from which people generally prefer to keep away because it seems distant, complicated and incomprehensible. But is it really so?
The exciting story proposed in the book intends to bring contemporary music closer to its potential listeners through the stories of people such as Stockhausen, Gershwin, Berio, Xenakis, Takemitsu, Piazzolla or Sofija Gubajdulina who, in their variety, give an idea of the exceptional richness of the musical languages of the 20th and 21st centuries and their closeness to the human condition of our time.

As John Cage wrote in his book A Year from Monday, the " current use for art [is] giving instances of society suitable for social imitation—suitable because they show ways. .. people can do things without being told or telling others what to do. " Cage's ideal anarchic music emphasizes not only renouncing compositional control, but also the process of self-discovery happening to everyone, a process that leads participants to discover their creative abilities. This paper argues that Cage's penchant for self-discovery came from his understanding of George Herbert Mead's theories of the process of individuation (the " me " and the " I "). Cage discovered Mead through reading Zen and American Thought (1962) by his friend Van Meter Ames, a professor of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, who saw the compatibility between Zen and Mead's concept of self in the capacity of the " I, " a phase of self whose unpredictable steps contribute to human innovation. Cage found the possibility of overthrowing the thought of the world through triggering a self-discovery of the " I " in everyone. He realized this idea in his happenings, such as 0'00 ", by requiring performers to respond to the simple descriptions without specifying sound or duration.

Discussions of “silent cinema” have generally focused on films made during the silent era (1894–1929). Even after the spread of synchronized sound, however, several experimental filmmakers created films without soundtracks, purely visual experiences that challenged cinema’s status as a multisensory medium. This article gives close attention to Stan Brakhage’s 1959 film "Window Water Baby Moving" as a way of outlining
some of the effects of cinematic silence, such as aesthetic ambiguity and a heightened awareness of cinema’s visual rhythms.

Analysis of Cage’s Silence is motivated by a question of the possibility to hear silence. Analysis benefits from Cage’s claim of the impossibility to hear silence when it is understood as an absence of sound as well as from further considerations in which Cage does not refrain from using the perspective of perceptible silence. A moment of expectation of a listener who have their idea of silence before they begin to listen, is brought into account. The impossibility to hear an absence of sound is interpreted as an answer to two related questions: if there is silence and how it is perceptible. The explication of these is the main subject of this text.

Nasledujúca úvaha o tichu a Johnovi Cageovi je  motivovaná otázkou, či môžeme počuť ticho a aké sú dôvody toho, keď tvrdíme, že nie alebo áno. Cage nám ponúka dve odlišné vysvetlenia, prečo nemôžeme počuť ticho, ak ho chápeme ako absenciu zvuku (čo je jeho vlastný pôvodný návrh). Za prvé, ticho nie je absenciou zvuku (revízia pôvodného návrhu), za druhé, aj keby ticho bolo absenciou zvuku, nie je možné ju počuť (hlbšia analýza). Cage v Silence redefinuje pojem ticha: ticho nie je počuteľné, ale je vnímateľné ako trvanie nezámerných zvukov. Tým sa problém ticha skomplikuje o potrebu skúmať rolu pozorovateľa ticha-pozornosti, zameranosti, chcenia a očakávania ticha. Cageove úvahy tak môžeme chápať ako príspevok k súčasnej filozofickej diskusii o absenciách, ktorej hlavným problémom je práve možnosť vnímať absenciu.

Abstrakt. Prekursorem "demokratycznego" myślenia o sztuce -głoszącego, że sztuka traktująca swoją rolę odpowiedzialnie nie może pozostawać oddzielona od kontekstu, w jakim powstaje -był amerykański filozof pragmatysta John Dewey. Twierdził on, że tzw. wartości estetyczne sztuki, a więc te przypisywane sztuce "wysokiej", przedawangardowej -odnosząc się tylko do jednej sfery życia, tej mianowicie, którą przyjęło się określać mianem estetycznej -pomijają inne sfery, w tym sferę tzw. codzienności. W podobnym duchu sytuację estetyczną postrzega kontynuator Deweya, amerykański kompozytor i teoretyk muzyki John Cage. Jednym z wymiarów "pragmatystycznego" podejścia Cage'a do problemów estetycznych jest jego idea kontyngencji artystycznej. Artykuł analizuje ją w odniesieniu do koncepcji aleatoryzmu muzycznego i pojęcia doświadczenia estetycznego.

August 29, 1952, in Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock: a historic event takes place. The pianist David Tudor closes and opens the piano lid three times, without touching the keyboard itself, during the premiere performance of John Cage’s new composition. This piece, called 4′33′′ has been written for a “silent piano.” It is a composition that is NOT to be played! Critics and the audience find the joke poor. Today, depending on the individual point of view, 4′33′′ might be interpreted in hundreds of different ways.
Keywords: John Cage, 2oth Century Avant-Garde, experimental music.

We discuss here the function of the concept of algorithm in the musical production of non-computational works, generalizing the idea proposing it as an adequate tool for the conception of open works. The paper considers also the strategic use of the algorithm idea for musical works conceived as a poetic synthesis from determined authors and brings a brief analysis of the John Cage’s piece Music Walk (1958).

The ‘Irish Bartók’ question has been around for decades, but is there still some value in the concept? Composer Dave Flynn argues that there is, and that now is the time for a new engagement by Irish composers with Irish traditional music and musicians.

Becoming commercially available in the mid 1960s, video quickly became integral to the intense experimentalism of New York City's music and art scenes. The medium was able to record image and sound at the same time, which allowed composers to visualize their music and artists to sound their images. But as well as creating unprecedented forms of audiovisuality, video work also producedinteractive spaces that questioned conventional habits of music and art consumption. This book explores the first decade of creative video work, focusing on the ways in which video technology was used to dissolve the boundaries between art and music.

Although the cellist Charlotte Moorman was most famed for her topless performances of Nam June Paik’s _Opera Sextronique_ and subsequent arrest for indecent exposure, she spent her entire career grappling with John Cage’s _26’ 1.1499’’ for a String Player_. Yet, as Benjamin Piekut has demonstrated in _Experimentalism Otherwise_, Cage was unhappy with her interpretation of the piece. This particular score allows significant freedom in terms of sound production, though the temporality in which it occurs is strictly defined. Especially in collaboration with Nam June Paik, Moorman increasingly exceeded the confines of the notation and shifted her focus to the section of the score calling for “sounds other than those produced on the strings.” She maintained a serious and earnest dedication to Cage’s original score, though Moorman’s personal markings eventually supplanted the composer’s as her performances with Paik became more extravagant and spectacular.
Building on Piekut’s study, this paper draws from archival material in the Charlotte Moorman Collection and the John Cage Correspondence at Northwestern University to interpret her personal, annotated score for _26’ 1.1499”_. Cage’s unconventional notation requires collaboration from the performer, who must complete his compositional process in order to make the work performable. The piece became a catalyst for Moorman to explore and embrace her agency as an artist. A close reading of Moorman’s annotations illuminates her artistic and interpretive approach and serves as an archive of its performance history. _26’1.1499’’_ became a vehicle for Moorman to find her artistic voice and to embark on a remarkable career in avant-garde performance. She injected a visually and acoustically embodied version of herself into this artifact that Cage produced. A lifelong devotee of Cage’s music and philosophy, Moorman took full advantage of the intrinsic freedom of the score, even when it surpassed the boundaries envisioned by the composer.

Just as John Cage used chance techniques to relinquish control in his practice as a composer, he used pedagogical techniques that facilitated shared learning and experimentation. The tenets of Critical Pedagogy, as laid out by Paulo Freire in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, offer insights into the structures and strategies implicit in John Cage’s work as an educator. A survey of accounts by former students of Cage, as well as Cage’s writings on education show that Cage’s approach to both classroom and individualized teaching was characterized by the principles of co-intentional dialogue, praxis, holistic engagement, and an awareness of education as a moral and political act. Critical pedagogy, which clearly articulates and generalizes these principles, therefore offers an analysis that makes it possible to separate John Cage’s innovations in music pedagogy from his personality and aesthetics, rendering them available for further development and application.

Iverson's groundbreaking analysis is based on the idea that there is a pressing need to revise several persistent narratives surrounding the WDR studio, the Darmstadt Summer Courses, and the role of Karlheinz Stockhausen. This book invites us to turn our attention to a larger network of persons and institutions that fostered new music and electronic music in the postwar era.

Sonatas e Interludios es una obra maestra que finaliza su primer periodo, de gran complejidad; pero también es un paso al uso de las probabilidades y de la indeterminación en sus procesos y objetivos compositivos. Un nuevo concepto de sonoridad desarrollado a través del piano preparado, y la profundización de los pensamientos filosóficos orientales, que dan lugar a posiciones críticas, búsqueda de un propio lenguaje y al desarrollo de un genio creativo como lo fue John Cage.

Hoppy (John Hopkins) was many-sided. He'd studied physics and mathematics at Cambridge and worked as physicists for the Atomic Energy Commission till he fell in with the CND. Like many people in the Underground, he'd dabbled in almost everything, including music and publishing, before becoming a photographer and major force behind the Underground events.

In 1989, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MoCA) invited the American composer and artist John Cage to create a new artwork. The result was a chance-derived four movement composition for museum entitled Rolywholyover A Circus. The composition, as conceptualized by Cage, was executed after his death in 1992 by MoCA's curator Julie Lazar and travelled between 1993-95 from Los Angeles to Houston, Philadelphia, New York and Mito, Japan. While many other artists have experimented with the form of an art exhibition, Cage’s project constituted something new: he constructed his exhibition in a manner akin to his musical composition. For example, one of the composition's four movements, the Main Circus, was an ongoing performative event. Hundreds of artworks, objects, and pieces of ephemera were subjected to a chance-derived computerized score, in which the displayed artworks were referred to only by number, allowing visitors to see in front of them a computer printing out generated changes which in turn were translated to works being hung on the walls and taken down. In another movement, the museumcircle, Cage composed a sculptural space which was informed by Erratum Musicale (1913), the first musical work of the French-American artist Marcel Duchamp. Through his engagement with the art exhibition, Cage formed a new field of research – the composer as a curator – where the exhibition space adopts sound composition principles, and thereby, alters the concept of exhibition-making.

This essay considers aspects of the pedagogy behind the PBS children's show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Too easily sentimentalized--and sometimes satirized--for his exploration of feelings and empathy, Fred Rogers in fact carefully structures each show around an investigation of semiotic, phenomenological and epistemological concerns: the interpretation of images, words, things, events and kinesthetic sensation that allows children (and adults) to locate themselves in their everyday experience.

This paper is an attempt to construct a spatial acoustic theory on the manner of operations within John Cage’s 1963 musical composition titled Variations IV. In constructing such a theory I introduce Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter’s notion of aural architecture, reflect on a number of details and references in Cage’s score, and apply the visualisation methodology of semiotician A. J. Greimas. I also examine Cage’s realisation directives as a system of emergence, primarily through the work’s notation and its inherent spatial proclivities. In applying the semiotic square visualisation technique of Greimas I further derive the deep-level concepts of site, scale, landscape, and architecture, and discuss their relevance to the manner in which an emergent aural architecture is constructed by the work. A final diagram maps the listener experience of Variations IV as one predicated on the merging between interior and exterior acoustic spaces through the fluctuating interrelation between local and distant sound events and the architectural form.

"Happenings" have pop connotations that conjure up 1960s youth culture and hippies in public, joyful rebellion. Scholars, meanwhile, locate happenings in a genealogy of avant-garde performance that descends from futurism, surrealism, and Dada through the action painting of the 1950s. Allan Kaprow coined the term in 1958 to name a new collage form of performance, calling happenings “radical prototypes” of performance art. Radical Prototypes argues for a more complex etiology, for these experiential and experimental works offered not a happy communalism but a strong and canny critique of contemporary sociality. Indeed, happenings were far more ambivalent, negative, and even creepy than they have been portrayed, either in contemporaneous accounts or in more recent efforts to connect them to contemporary art’s participatory strategies.

My title, Radical Prototypes, derives from a corrective remark Kaprow made in 1991. Heading off the comparison of his environments to the burgeoning practice of installation art, Kaprow wrote: “The Installation is to the Environment as the Performance is to the Happening: [they are] retardataire forms of radical prototypes.” Inasmuch as the participatory happenings and the early environments were radical, prospective, and experimentalist open works, Kaprow viewed these prototypes and installation and performance, the “retardataire forms” they putatively generated, as “antithetical,” for the latter, in their very derivative specificity, conventionalized their models. A dedicated avant-gardist and deeply committed to experimentalism, Kaprow would have welcomed the tinkering novelty implied by the “invention” of my title, too, and welcomed the multiple ironies it points to. Kaprow recognized, even before he had produced the word “happening,” that what he had “invented” was just one name for an emergent set of art practices being explored at the same moment by artists in the United States, Europe, and Japan, and that the form had been instantiated well before it had been named.

The attached file is chapter 3, "The Black Box," the central chapter of the book.

John Cages theories on simultaneity, chance operations and indeterminacy influenced the artists of the Fluxus group. The articles features different concepts of Cages notations and the event cards of Fluxus artists. The relations between performances and videos especially in works by Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys are discussed. The relevance of Cage´s concept and artistic practice for these uses of new media is explained.
In: URL: http://dreher.netzliteratur.net/2_Cage.pdf

« Quelle que soit la direction, le chemin, tout passe par la décision de se dévouer, de faire attention à tout ce qui est extérieur à soi-même, de s'abandonner 1. » John Cage (1978) L'histoire des théories et des pratiques de l'éducation est aux États-Unis tout à fait singulière, notamment en raison du fait que l'éducation a été associée dès l'origine à l'institution de la citoyenneté. Jefferson par exemple avait placé au centre de son projet de Constitution pour la Virginie l'éducation élémentaire, secondaire et supérieure comme cette partenaire directe et nécessaire de la politique du pays libre que les Pères Fondateurs voulaient créer. Parmi ces traits distinctifs, la plupart nous sont familiers, en raison du fait que l'idéal démocratique de la participation des citoyens au gouvernement et le système de l'école publique qui lui sert d'assise se sont ensuite propagés vers « la vieille Europe ». Toutefois l'un des traits les plus marquants de l'éducation que les Américains ont promue n'a pas d'équivalent dans notre tradition. Il s'agit de l'éducation « en plein air », « en extérieur », « au dehors », une famille de pratique appelée outdoor education. Cette dernière a d'abord été imaginée au cours des années 1920 par un Juif Allemand, Kurt Martin Hahn, mais n'a connu de développement spectaculaire qu'en Amérique du Nord, aux États-Unis et au Canada, ainsi qu'en Australie. Chaque école, chaque université, chaque collège y est jusqu'à aujourd'hui doté d'un programme d'éducation en plein air, qui est désigné par les expressions suivantes : éducation environnementale, éducation par l'aventure, éducation par les jeux en plein air, éducation par le challenge, éducation par l'expérience, souvent référée à Dewey, et finalement éducation au dehors, outdoor. Dans la plupart des cas, les activités organisées mobilisent une certaine prouesse physique, une réelle prise de risque, (par exemple escalade, descente de rapides en canoë, spéléologie) et des capacités de s'ajuster aux autres dans le cadre

Ceramics had a far-reaching impact in the second half of the twentieth century, as its artists worked through the same ideas regarding abstraction and form as those for other creative mediums. Live Form shines new light on the relation of ceramics to the artistic avant-garde by looking at the central role of women in the field: potters who popularized ceramics as they worked with or taught male counterparts like John Cage, Peter Voulkos, and Ken Price.

Sorkin focuses on three Americans who promoted ceramics as an advanced artistic medium: Marguerite Wildenhain, a Bauhaus-trained potter and writer; Mary Caroline (M. C.) Richards, who renounced formalism at Black Mountain College to pursue new performative methods; and Susan Peterson, best known for her live throwing demonstrations on public television. Together, these women pioneered a hands-on teaching style and led educational and therapeutic activities for war veterans, students, the elderly, and many others. Far from being an isolated field, ceramics offered a sense of community and social engagement, which, Sorkin argues, crucially set the stage for later participatory forms of art and feminist collectivism.

Musica e Danza sono espressioni sfaccettate fatte di somiglianze e differenze. Il ritmo è una delle dimensioni che le tiene assieme. Musica e Danza interagiscono e si incontrano. Ma la storia dell'evoluzione della musica per la danza è sempre ricca e lunga. Nel secondo dopoguerra Cunnungham e Cage hanno teorizzato l'assoluta autonomia di danza e musica.

From the mid-twentieth century into the twenty-first, artists and musicians manipulated, cracked, and broke audio media technologies to produce novel sounds and performances. Artists and musicians, including John Cage, Nam June Paik, Yasunao Tone, and Oval, pulled apart both playback devices (phonographs and compact disc players) and the recorded media (vinyl records and compact discs) to create an extended sound palette. In Cracked Media, Caleb Kelly explores how the deliberate utilization of the normally undesirable (a crack, a break) has become the site of productive creation. Cracked media, Kelly writes, slides across disciplines, through music, sound, and noise. Cracked media encompasses everything from Cage's silences and indeterminacies, to Paik's often humorous tape works, to the cold and clean sounds of digital glitch in the work of Tone and Oval. Kelly offers a detailed historical account of these practices, arguing that they can be read as precursors to contemporary new media.

Kelly looks at the nature of recording technology and the music industry in relation to the crack and the break, and discusses the various manifestations of noise, concluding that neither theories of recording nor theories of noise offer an adequate framework for understanding cracked media. Connecting the historical avant-garde to modern-day turntablism, and predigital destructive techniques to the digital ticks, pops, and clicks of the glitch, Kelly proposes new media theorizations of cracked media that focus on materiality and the everyday.

Cet ouvrage explore les démarches d’artistes qui ne recourent jamais au hasard « par hasard ». Ils le pratiquent et le pensent au contraire à travers des méthodes rigoureuses où l’activité artistique croise la philosophie et les sciences. Le hasard est appréhendé en situation, dans sa dimension opératoire, à travers l’analyse des oeuvres, des méthodes et des textes d’une dizaine d’artistes et de musiciens dont les figures principales sont André
Breton, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Boulez, John Cage et François Morellet. Distinct de l’accident et de l’informe, le hasard comme méthode se définit comme un exercice d’attention, une discipline qui interroge les limites de l’invention, le goût, la mémoire et l’oubli, les conditions de la perception. Comprendre ce qui est en jeu lorsque Cage assimile le hasard au silence,
lorsque Duchamp le met « en conserve » ou que Breton cherche à « l’objectiver » conduit, dans chaque cas, à restituer un champ théorique spécifique qui permet à cette question de se déployer en dehors des oppositions classiques de l’ordre et du désordre, du contrôle et de la déprise, de la forme et de l’accident.

This essay argues that key aspects of Fluxus have a striking resemblance to the ideas and antics of the computer “hackers” who, in the sixties and seventies, defined the culture of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence lab. The past several decades have seen the rise of a rich body of scholarship on hackers and the cultural critique that their practices imply. By relating this “hacker ethic” to the works of the Fluxus artists (who likewise practiced in the sixties and seventies), this essay argues that Fluxus deserves to be understood not as a late manifestation of dada or the inchoate prefiguration of conceptual art and institutional critique, but rather as the first avant-garde movement fit to the age of electronic information and their network protocols.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modernism-modernity/v022/22.4.rothman.html

El arte de nuestro tiempo aturde ruidosamente con exhortaciones al silencio – señala Susan Sontag en una de las más pertinentes aproximaciones a la estética del silencio publicadas en los últimos años. He aquí un nihilismo coqueto, incluso alegre, afirma Son-tag. Reconocemos el imperativo del silencio, pero seguimos ha-blando. Ante el silencio podemos adoptar dos actitudes: o llevarlo al extremo de la autonegación total o practicarlo  de una manera “ingeniosamente incoherente”, dando por  sentado que los mitos del silencio y del vacío son tan enriquecedores como cualquier otro experimento creativo  .
Más que referirme a las múltiples acepciones del concepto de si-lencio desde el punto de vista lingüístico, antropológico, literario o espiritual en esta conferencia buscaré acotar la magmática car-tografía  del silencio en un arco cronológico y conceptual que irá desde la modernidad hasta el actual momento global, un amplísi-mo período que abordaremos con citas puntuales algunas del ám-bito de la teoría, la filosofía, el pensamiento  y otras del arte: mú-sica, cine y artes visuales.
Pero ¿qué papel ocupa en este proceso el silencio? En nuestra ci-vilización occidental, eminentemente verbal, siempre se ha pri-mado la palabra, el lenguaje y la actividad simbólica sobre el si-lencio, que se ha entendido como “el fondo” sobre el que el que se sitúa la figura, la palabra. Pero en el lenguaje existe también una noción alusiva, oblicua, opaca: “Todo lenguaje es indirecto o alusivo; es si, se quiere, silencio. Y siempre partiendo  no tanto de un uso empírico del lenguaje, sino  de su uso creador que sería sinónimo de silencio”.

This article has been published in a revised form in Tempo [http://doi.org/10.1017/S0040298211000350]. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for re-distribution, re-sale or use in derivative works. © 2011 Cambridge University Press.

Filosofie www.mimesisedizioni.it filosofiE MiMEsis John CagE Una rivolUzionE lUnga CEnt'anni a CuRa dI gIaCoMo FRonzI Con un'InteRvIsta InedIta gIaCoMo FRonzI (a CuRa dI) John CagE la rivoluzione resta la nostra preoccupazione. Ma invece di pianificarla, o di smettere quello che stiamo facendo per farla, potrebbe essere che noi vi siamo già dentro in ogni momento John Cage 1912-2012. Il centenario della nascita di John Cage può essere un buon pretesto per rileggere e approfondire la figura e l'opera di uno dei personaggi più bizzarri, geniali e rivoluzionari della storia della cultura e della musica internazionali. Il volume propone un percorso che si dirama tra sentieri filosofici, estetologici, musicologici e sociologico-politici, senza trascurare l'intenso dialogo del compositore con il pensiero orientale, con il continente delle neoavanguardie musicali ed artistiche (statunitensi ed europee), e con il mondo della danza. Questo libro celebra un compositore dalle idee innovative, un uomo dalle accese passioni, dai molti amori musicali, letterari e intellettuali, e intende farlo "cageanamente", ripercorrendone la vita, l'attività e le linee di pensiero senza barriere interdisciplinari. Contributi di emanuele arciuli, alessandro Bertinetto, Franco degrassi, Roberto doati, giacomo Fronzi, enrico Fubini, Marco gatto, alessandro giovannucci, elio grazioli, elisa guzzo vaccarino, erberto Lo Bue, Roberto Masotti, Heinz-Klaus Metzger, stephen Piccolo, emanuele Quinz, Fiorella sassanelli; con un'intervista di stephen Montague a John Cage, per la prima volta pubblicata integralmente in traduzione italiana. giacomo fronzi (1981), laureato in Filosofia (università di Lecce) e in Musicologia (università "Ca' Foscari" di venezia), è dottore di ricerca in etica e antropologia filosofica all'università del salento, dove collabora e svolge attività di ricerca presso la cattedra di estetica. si è diplomato in pianoforte presso il Conservatorio "t. schipa" di Lecce. si interessa prevalentemente di estetica contemporanea, estetica musicale e filosofia della musica. oltre ad articoli e saggi su riviste nazionali ed internazionali, ha pubblicato i volumi Etica ed estetica della relazione (Milano 2009), Contaminazioni. Esperienze estetiche nella contemporaneità (Milano 2010), Theodor W. Adorno. Pensiero critico e musica (Milano 2011). È di prossima uscita Electrosound. Storia ed estetica della musica elettronica (torino 2013). © 2012 -MIMESIS EDIZIONI (Milano -Udine)

A treatise for the Summer 2015 issue of Chilean sound art journal AURAL on the ways that sound shapes our experience of living.

Upon developing an acute awareness of the psycho-social effects of atmosphere, we become what 20th century philosopher Henri Lefebvre (and Gaston Bachelard and Pinheiro dos Santos before him) termed “rhythmanalysts”: “Everywhere there is interaction between a place, a time, and an expenditure of energy there is rhythm”...[The rhythmanalyst] is capable of listening to a house, a street, a town as one listens to a symphony…”

Part 1, Chapter 2: Composing Sociality: Toward an Aesthetics of Transition Design

Composing sociality is a group practice in which artwork functions in tandem with natural social systems.  Composing sociality is a feedback loop: group irreconcilabilities reveal features of the artist’s work that feed back once again into people’s everyday lives. Sound artwork can be positioned anywhere socially, spatially, or temporally and may include any imaginable ways that sound and music help the organizational structures of a collectivity, financially, for morale, or otherwise. This may include the artist’s imagined design structures, networking possibilities, or other social interfaces in which they are involved that include the use of sound and music.

First, I reframe the term “composition” in the light of sound studies and then I reevaluate the premises of experimental music and sound work as founded in the mid-twentieth century by John Cage and others in order to identify and isolate unhelpful biases that have enervated the broadening of sound aesthetics in the academy and still inhibit forms of sonic collectivity such as composing sociality. Thereafter, I consider aesthetic issues of authorship and control within a process of co-creation and how I have looked to transition design concepts as a guide in the seemingly contradictory scenario of art that deals with society as one of its materials. Then I describe one way the artist’s imagination can specifically and analytically engage to encompass an expanded field of social relations in sound art—“social tonality.” Finally, I consider how sound and music may possibly function as a public contract in a gift economy, and, therefore, even as an alternative kind of currency, where mutual support and investigative listening can become a means toward group self- realization. Along the way I consider, by way of example, approaches to composing sociality by Brian Harnetty, Brandon LaBelle, Laura Mello, Carlos Sandoval, and Ultra-red among others. I conclude by contextualizing the concept of social composition further by describing a few of my own experimental sound works with urban gardens.

激浪派並不是一種藝術 流派，它沒有文本，精確地說， 它更接近於一種表達方式和生存 態度，許多躍入其中的參與人， 各自詮釋激浪派而發展獨特的演 繹形式，於是其面貌始終模糊， 形體變化不定，然而可以綜括的 是：它總是幽默、輕薄、偶發， 卻僅只是想像的共同體。從宣言 迄今，走過半世紀的激浪派，其 肉身已經從1960年代的少年邁入 中老年。過往以無敘事、隨機的 行為拼貼，做為對秩序化、正典 化的藝術史之抵抗，如今卻成為 一場詛咒：拒絕被收編於歷史的 藝術家們，一位接一位地被收藏 家著書、付梓；而他們自豪的 「虛無戲法」，也成了影響後現代 藝術最壯闊的一場革命，激浪派 終究被自己開了最大的玩笑。

El artículo investiga Los Encuentros de Pamplona, un certamen internacional de prácticas artísticas contemporáneas celebrado en España en 1972 por iniciativa privada, como un laboratorio de la democracia: como un campo de ensayo, debate y posicionamiento de los debates políticos, sociales, administrativos, económicos y simbólicos que se venían produciendo desde hacía algunos años y que iban a alcanzar representatividad y visualización en España tras la muerte de Franco y el final del régimen dictatorial. Artistas, colectivos, agentes implicados: John Cage, Centro de Calculo, Shusaku Arakawa, Madeleine Gins, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Robert Llimós, José Miguel de Prada Poole, Dennis Oppenheim; Eduardo Chillida, Zaj, Kathakali de Kerala, Steve Reich, Laura Dean, Dziga Vertov, Buñuel, Man Ray.

""When writing about Cage, we encounter many difficulties with terminology. How to describe in a summary manner, without misunderstandings a writer, composer, teacher, music and social critic, poet, painter, anarchist, speaker, cultural animator, mycologist and a New Yorker in one person? In relation to musical practice, with which he is most often associated, he preferred to describe himself as an “organizer of sounds” and it seems that it was not only a stylistic manipulation, but the expression of a certain attitude, characterized by a high degree of distrust in relation to the musical tradition (which Cage consistently challenged), inherited from aesthetic components such as composition, work of art, score, harmony, as well as the artistry of composition. A paradoxical and somewhat surprising feature of his artistic practice, which ultimately sought to deny the foundations of matters in which he dabbled, was that it at first glance, the accidental and absurd assumptions were the result of meticulous study and analysis, creating a very coherent and thoughtful whole. Th e conceptual dimension of Cage’s artistic achievements allows to situate his work within the phenomenon that Kosuth describes as “art after philosophy” , in turn Cage himself in a suggestive manner defines the philosophical and conceptual nature of his art, writing that “philosophy for the [contemporary] artist is what the Bible is for the priest”. Certainly, Cage’s artistic achievements should not be put in the same category with the achievements of artists, whose only tangible characteristic is that of a single sweeping gesture to crack down on binding canons, undefining all that is definite. Cage’s artistic and ideological path strongly denies such an image. This book takes a bearings of this path.
The aim of my work is the reconstruction of the philosophical framework that creates the conceptual content of the work of the author of Silence. This analysis is a de facto reconstruction of the foundations of his aesthetic and ideological system . The reconstruction appears to be interesting because it contains the schema of possible references of Cage’s aesthetic to its various philosophical aspects, including those that were oblivious to him. Aspect (Latin appearance) is a frame, from which is considered a given object or phenomenon. “Philosophical” means in this case - a reference to a philosopher or a philosophical position. In Cage’s “paradoxical case” the possibility of such an approach seems to be twofold. On the one hand it presents ideas that deserve, in my opinion, attention, because they seem to me to be the most “adequate” to present the creative path of the author of Music of Change and the most “in his spirit.” They are not only original concepts, their presence in the vicinity of Cage’s aesthetic views is often dictated by the duty to simply repeat what Cage himself considered the conceptual framework of his creative activity. I am first and foremost thinking about the views of D.T. Suzuki, H.D. Thoreau, J. Joyce, B. Fuller and M. McLuhan. Subsequently capturing the aesthetic phenomenon of the works of the author of Four in the light of philosophical and artistic ideas of F. Nietzsche, J. Dewey, S. Beckett, M. Heidegger, J.-P. Sartre, J. Derrida, J.-F. Lyotard, J.-N. Vuarnet and W. Welsch may be a risky treatment, but in my opinion, fully justified. On the other hand, built by Cage for more than half a century, the conceptual edifice of hisart, is not merely the chance result of various influences (conscious or unconscious), but appears in the eyes of the investigator as an independent being, deserving of attention and introduction, which on closer examination carries with it a whole new quality, putting the researcher in the face of unpleasant fact of almost complete incompatibility of the existing conceptual apparatus to describe this unexpected phenomenon. For the researcher, however, there is no other way. A researcher must come from that which is known, to perchance get to what is apparently unknown, or only temporarily inexpressible. He must at the same time give up many of the usual ways and habits, to see the matters from another perspective.
In the opinion of most researchers of the work of the author of Music of Changes a very important element that should be taken into account during the reconstruction of his views, is biography. This is the engine of his aesthetic choices. Spheres of practice and art, everyday experience and aesthetic experience are indeed inextricably linked for Cage, penetrating to the extent that almost always aesthetic choices are determined by the life situations, and not vice versa. They also shape by what might be called the world view of creator, but also his attitude and moral life. During writing, I used David Revill’s competent biography The Roaring Silence: John Cage - A Life, which, irrespective of magnitude of the accumulated evidence of the source material remains a proof of almost crystalline objectivity of the author: as when he describes the lessons that Cage learned due to difficult experiences of an emotional crisis period (due to personal problems) and financial collapse (which is related to the economic crisis of 1930s America and the hardships of war). From this period: “lesson of acceptance” and “practice of patience” in relation to own emotions - at first just as exuberant, as unfulfilled - in relation to the world and the people, sounds and musical material (supported by the idea explained to him by G. Sarabhai: “to sober and quiet the mind”) - became the guiding motto in Cage’s life. In the shape of subsequent aesthetic assumptions, the deficit in talent and “staying in line”, were also reflected in almost all the components of the Cage’s concept of art such as acting to overcome both his own individual limitations, and the entire former Western aesthetic paradigm.
My work consists of five chapters, introduction and conclusion. It also contains a time line of John Cage’s life, bibliography of Cage’s writings, titles of major critical studies and the remaining critical bibliography. In the first chapter At the basis of avant-garde. Some facts from the history of aesthetics from Kant to Cage in the context of an aesthetic nature of art (with music in the background), raises the question of the status of contemporary aesthetics and the adequacy of its categories for the description of contemporary art. To introduce the reader to the problems of aesthetics, I present Kant’s conception of beauty and Hegel’s and Schelling’s concept of art in the context of a dispute about the aesthetic nature of art (A. Danto, G. Dickie). Then, I present Nietzsche’s concept of art with particular emphasis on Wagner’s impact, all in relation to the fundamental dilemmas of creative individual in the modern era. In the next part I describe the avant-garde revolution, which took place in the play first half of the twentieth century in relation to theoretical propositions of Dewey, Adorno, and Bauman. In the second chapter In Schoenberg’s circle: the source of new music, I present the history of acquaintance between the creator of dodecaphony and Cage and the reasons for their separation in connection with the concept of expressionist art, taking into account the position of anti expressionistic Popper, and all this in the context of opposition of tonality to atonality and the uniquely American category of “experimental action”. The third chapter From sound to noise, from noise to silence. Formation of a new aesthetic of music by John Cage, I present the assumptions of Cage’s first manifest Future of Music: Credo, the impact of development of American civilization on aesthetic of his early ideas, the relation of Cage to Futurism, the concept of noise as an integral component of music in the context of twentieth- century discoveries in the field of electro-acoustics, psychology of the new perception, lying at the basis of the Listening to music manifesto, the concept of “music of all sounds” and “music of all time” as well as Cage’s understanding of time in the context of ontological discontinuity of the universe of sounds, and essential for his aesthetics of music, the term “indeterminacy of the composition.” In the fourth chapter Between art and experience, I describe the sequence of events from the biography of Cage, which had a direct influence on the shaping of his conception of art, in respect to the development of technology, artist’s creative and emotional crisis, relationships (including social) with abstract expressionism and discovering the silence for music. In the fifth chapter Philosophy and the aesthetic dimension of the work of John Cage, I present his views in the context of the anti-platonism position (Nietzsche, B. Fuller), a dispute between modernism and the avant-garde, and also in relation to the pragmatist concept of aesthetic experience (Dewey), the time and the sublime categories (Beckett, Lyotard), the concepts of fear and chance (Heidegger, Sartre), the experimental action and chance (W. Welsch, M. Eldred), the concept of demilitarization of language and a new philosophy of reception (Derrida), and in the context of Eastern thought (Suzuki), anarchist and apolitical nature of art (Thoreau, Artaud), Marxist criticism (C. Cardew) and the philosopher-artist category (J.-N. Vuarnet).""
trans. Magda Gziut